


All the World Has Changed

by ReachForTheStars



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, Far Future
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 05:14:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16510013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReachForTheStars/pseuds/ReachForTheStars
Summary: Arwen has lived for thousands of years, and will live for thousands more.





	All the World Has Changed

Arwen Undomiel, Lady of Rivendell, Queen of the Reunited Kingdom, picked up her coffee from the Starbucks counter. Checking her ear prostheses (so routinely as to be unconscious), she found an empty booth and slid into it. Despite her efforts to avoid attention, she noted a man across the store scrutinizing her, undoubtedly _almost_ perceiving the difference in her stride. She stared back at him, and he averted his gaze nervously. He'd forget her before long.

  
She sipped the steaming drink. In centuries past, she would have at least winced at the taste, but the millennia of the rough, practical food and drink of men had coarsened her palate. Now, the coffee was just something to sharpen her nerves, which seemed to have become more and more necessary as the centuries had passed.

  
Arwen traced the wrinkles on her face, frowning. She had lived thousands of years, and would perhaps live thousands more yet, but age was taking its slow toll, even on her. She thought back over her long life, letting the steam's moisture caress her face. If her story was to be told, she thought, it must be told well.

  
After Sauron's fall had come the finest one hundred and twenty years, ninety-seven days, and five hours of her life. Elessar. Aragorn...some memories had faded, but not those. Never those. She remembered it all: setting policy together at council, gazing up at the stars together on the palace roof with warm bodies entwined, the long rides across the Pelennor to the new Osgiliath, the hours of indescribably ecstatic passion in the royal bedchamber, the magnificent agony of giving birth to his son...it had seemed as if they had both gone to Valinor after all, a century of what had felt like unending high beauty.

  
She had borne him Eldarion, then two daughters, after which she decided that, as beautiful and precious as her children were, she did not wish to go through nine long months of pregnancy, and childbirth, again. She remembered that, too: Eldarion sucking at her breast, his babbling of mixed elvish and human tongues, holding him together with Aragorn when he cried through a roaring thunderstorm, walking with him through the gardens and telling him all the many things she knew about the flora and watching his eyes light up with wonder at a beautiful world, seeing him slowly learn reading and writing and figures...

  
It hadn't all been pleasant at the time, of course. Neither she nor Aragorn knew exactly how to raise a child who was neither human nor elf. He would try to emulate her effortless balance and, lacking full elvish grace, fall and injure himself. His human side would demand more cake, or refuse his lessons, or throw things, and scream and yell and whine, and she and Aragorn would argue about how to punish him. And he was stronger than an elf, but not so strong as a human, and so he would often get the worst of it in the rougher games with the nobles' children. But all those things passed, a tiny snarl in the long tapestry of Arwen's life: he learned what he could and could not balance upon, became wiser and gentler and more patient, and found ways to use agility in place of brute force. Arwen remembered him growing up, again at a pace between human and elf, and...she held back a tear. She remembered too much. She remembered his whole life, all two hundred and fifty-eight years of it. And she remembered burying him, and his sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters...old age had come for Aragorn first. His hair began to fall. He grew weak, little by little, old bones groaning, until he could barely lift Anduril. She didn't like to remember those times. They were one of the many times she doubted her choice: in Valinor she could have remembered him forever as he had been: his strength, his will, his clever yet humble mind...

  
And Elrond had been right, as well, about the fall of the glory of men...though the cause was not one he had imagined.

  
It happened in the third year of the reign of Elessar's great-great-grandson (as his and Arwen's blood grew thinner - their "genes" sparser - so the kings' lifespans had declined). He had been named Elrond, in honor of his ancestor, after Arwen had given her approval. They had kept doing that, for all those centuries: for almost any decision of any import, her progeny or their advisors would come to her, asking for her counsel (or, more frustrating yet, what she believed Aragorn would have done). She had never been certain what to do about this...yes, men needed guidance, but she had not wished to make them dependent on her. She knew if that went on, it would make her an immortal queen, with the current monarch bound by unalterable custom to defer to her in all things. Then, of course, all of that ceased to matter.

  
Whether it was merely the building up of pressure under the wreckage of Mordor, or some last device or spirit of Sauron, without the slightest warning, what had been Orodruin exploded. The humans now knew of such things as "supervolcanoes": great weaknesses in the Earth from which devastation could spew across a continent. The whole of Gorgoroth was blasted apart, and the long-suffering Nurnians died choking on fumes and ash.

  
The wind bore the ash west to Gondor, but not so quickly: there was time to abandon the cities, with all latched and mended and put in order for a return that would never be. Arwen had been one of the last out, personally dashing through the ash-mottled wind to find the last of the old and young and bring them to safety. She recalled that day like it was a moving picture (no, "movie", they'd shortened that): the dark stain spreading across the sky, the dim and sickly sunlight, the grains of ash stinging in her mouth and lungs, and the maddeningly incessant low rumble from the east.

  
But in the end, there had been nowhere to flee. The ash and dust rose into the higher air, blotting out the sunlight. Gray mingled with blue even on clear days, and spring never came that year.

  
She hated her memories of that time. She'd roamed far and wide, searching for food, and taking only barely enough to keep herself alive. Her ribs showed, her breasts shrank, her legs shook when she stood, but she pressed on, only to see men and women murder each other for what food she could bring. There was never enough. The mobs of exiles from Gondor quarreled and splintered, flailing north and south and east and west, but finding only places with no more food than those they'd left. She had beseeched the Valar, again and again, falling to her knees and praying hour after hour in the ancient Quenya, _restore us, aid us, guide us, please_ , please...

  
Arwen had followed the starving hordes south, to what they now called Africa, where the sky was clearer, the sun warmer, and there was enough food at last. And then at last the Valar had responded. They had remade the world one final time before vanishing forever, in manner beyond her ken changing past as well as present: none would ever find the ruins of the Reunited Kingdom's cities, only dinosaur bones, for they had been drawn away into the world that used to have been. But it was only with the discoveries of men, in the last century, that she had come to understand what the Valar had truly done: created untold billions of years of time and space before the making of the world, such that every wonderful, beautiful, wild specie of plant, animal, and those other things now known that weren't either, could be - _without_ the Valar. In their brilliance, they had made a world that could go on without them. But in their kindness, they had left her - and a few others - in it, to guide men along.

  
Arwen was jolted from her musings by her watch beeping. She swallowed the last of the bitter brew and stood, reflexively doing it in imitation of the slow clumsiness of humans, and walked out of the Starbucks.

  
Every time she started her motorcycle, she was reminded how much she despised its noise and fumes. She eagerly awaited the fully electric motorcycles being developed. Yet every time she reached speed, wind ripping past her, she was reminded why she loved it. Arwen gunned the engine, accelerating toward the highway. She didn't want to be late.


End file.
